How many years will city taxpayers suffer toxic mismanagement?

For more than 18-years, Historic City News has reported on
fraud, waste and abuse in local government when others were reluctant, or afraid,
to do so. When we started looking deeper
into the relationships between citizen board members and those officials who
appointed them, we identified questionable profiteering at taxpayer’s expense. Our publication took a lot of heat from
crooked politicians and more than a dozen tyrants who had become very comfortable
spending your money — without your oversight.

Although taxpayers love us and honest candidates for political office wear our endorsement like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, our mission to hold public officials accountable to the public only succeeds when citizens do their job. You must go to the polls to throw out the politicians who seem more concerned about representing themselves and their cronies, than representing the voters who put them in office. With the exception of the mayor, we haven’t seen that in the last 10-years. City voters keep returning the same tired faces to the city commission year after year.

We watch with surprise, disappointment, and disgust as management
inside the City of St Augustine becomes more and more toxic. Anyone can make a mistake, but at some point,
especially when you are talking about public funds, the public expects our
well-paid professional staff to be held accountable for sloppy, wasteful and highly
suspect decisions. We are way past that
point with City Manager John Regan.

John Patrick Regan Sr has worked for the City of St
Augustine since May 26, 1998. He turned
52-years-old in February. As city manager,
he is paid $164,110.59 annually, plus enhanced employee benefits. He is one of three city officials hired
directly by the city commission. Three
of the five voting commissioners are needed to hire or terminate his employment. About 360 other city employees, including all
the department heads, police chief, firefighters, public works, clerical,
accounting, and even the meter readers owe their job to Regan as they are hired
directly, or indirectly, by him.

Historic City News internal dossier

This city manager is predictably attracted to the latest
“shiny new thing”. Since we first
learned about the current spending bonanza in 2015, we’ve been following the
latest Regan “poor decision”. He
has been allowed to act without oversight or public accountability for too long. It has only emboldened his arrogance towards citizens. At issue in this case is the unnecessary and overly
expensive replacement of city water meters.
The project under Regan costs $4.7 million-dollars compared to an
estimated $1.5 million-dollar alternative that was never considered.

In another example of poor decision making, the Regan
appointee as Deputy Director of Public Works and the ADA Compliance Officer for
the non-compliant city is a professional geologist, Todd Grant. The Director of Public Works, Michael Cullum,
is one of those other professional engineers.
Regan had Grant introduce a presentation to the city commission making the
case to engage a first-generation meter reading technology company for a “pilot”
on automatic water meters.

Project Background

COSA Meter Profile: 13,000
accounts, 19 different water meter brands

Meters over 20-years-old: 26%
(useful meter life is 20 years)

Commercial meters account
for 12% of total water revenue.

Smaller meters account for
88% of water revenue.

The failed or stuck meters
account for 42% of revenue

The AMR business case
rested on faulty assumptions that the age of existing meters and lack of
standardization meant revenue loss, water leakage, and significantly
higher labor cost that could justify the cost of refitting to fancy new
meters.

Analysis results presented June 11, 2018

The “Pilot Program”
was completed in the fall of 2016 but the results were not reported to the
Commission until June of 2018.

The results of the “Pilot
Program” did not validate the initial assumptions.

The claim made to the
commission in September of 2016 was that a larger sample of data justified
the expansion of the “Pilot Program” to “Phase 1”.

The results of “Phase
1” did not validate the initial assumptions.

The bench testing showed
that 35% of the smaller meters and 86% of the larger commercial meters
were either “failed” or “stuck”.

There was no explanation as to why a routine review of billing had not detected the billing errors.

The choice of investing in
automation-versus-distribution was not in the best interests of businesses
or the City residents.

With over 40-miles of water
delivery pipe needing replacement, this decision flies in the face of
common sense, not to mention common financial standards

The estimated $2.5
million-dollar difference between choosing conventional meter replacement
over 5-years would have replaced two miles of distribution lines at $1.2 million-dollars
per mile

This delay and obfuscation
allowed the project to go forward to the “point of no return”.

This example highlights
the lack of management ability to evaluate capital investments.

Regan is an engineer, not a public administrator. The city already employs a half-dozen other professional
engineers. I’ve often heard that a camel
is just a horse designed by an engineer.
Regan is often so preoccupied with whether or not he can do something, that
he forgets to question if he should. The
time has come for the City of St Augustine to search for a professional public
administrator, not another professional engineer.